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Diamonds winked and gold gleamed in Las Vegas at this year’s Couture show as the glass cases lining the halls of the Wynne Hotel glittered with luxury jewels. In the city of dreams, the motto is “The bigger, the better,” and designer Marie Lichtenberg went all out for the June show, presenting her most technically complex and highest-value creation to date.
Lichtenberg took buttery-soft sage-green suede — a by-product from a French luxury house — and turned it into a haute bandana, sprinkling it with 386 handmade gold beads, diamond teardrops and ruby stars and finishing it with a gold chain. The piece took 280 hours to make in an Italian workshop.
“I see it as a piece of jewelry couture,” the designer comments. The hybrid jewel is sure to please her clients and collectors, who include music icons Rihanna and Jay Z and Formula One driver Lewis Hamilton.
For Lichtenberg, the bandana — her entry in this year’s Couture Design Awards — marks a statement of intent: “[Showing this piece] felt like giving birth to a manifesto. It wasn’t just jewelry, it was a statement of everything we believe in: savoir faire, excess as elegance, and the audacity to dream bigger, even when the world tells you to play [it] safe.”
Material world
In combining Italian artisanship with fine French leather, the $270,540 bandana marks a step into high jewelry for the Paris-based designer. She hinted at that direction in an April Instagram post: “Gold is reaching historic highs, and we believe the only way to go is up. So we’ve decided to lead the way. To reinvent ourselves, and keep doing what we do even more beautifully, and with ever more precious materials.… The price will be higher, but it will allow us to continue making sustainable jewelry with meaning and balance. We’re not just talking about numbers, but the ability to invest in the future of our craft.”
She’s not the only one to take such a stance; since then, other independent designers, including Zoe Chicco and Ruth Tomlinson, have made their own statements. In the face of skyrocketing prices, the strategy is to go haute, doubling down on quality materials to create increasingly precious jewelry.
“Complexity fuels me,” Lichtenberg says. “The chaos of the global economy is just another reason to aim higher.”
Kicking it all off is the bandana with its 280 grams of 18-karat gold, 17.68 carats of rubies and 3.09 carats of diamonds. While it didn’t snag a Couture award this year, this wasn’t Lichtenberg’s first rodeo. In 2022, she won Best in Debuting for the Blunt Box locket, which pops open to reveal a tiny joint, and in 2023, she won Best in Innovative for the Magic 8 Ball necklace.
Since launching her brand in 2019, she has been steadily building a dedicated following of people intent on owning a piece of her irreverent world. Today, support from top-tier jewelry retailers — such as Broken English, Bergdorf Goodman, and Elyse Walker — and collectors themselves is such that feedback on the price rise has been “overwhelmingly positive,” she reports. “People thanked us for the transparency. We live in times where sugar-coating doesn’t cut it. Speaking the truth, explaining the realities behind what we do, from raw materials to pricing, felt not only necessary, but expected. It was a bold move, but it resonated.”
Links in the chain
After spending 12 years as the fashion editor of French Elle and launching a capsule clothing line of Indian-crafted luxury shirts and shawls, Lichtenberg got the inspiration to start her jewelry brand from a family heirloom in her own collection. Her mother, who has Martinican Creole roots, gave her a traditional forçat chain when she was a teen — a piece that all the women in her family wore to represent emancipation. Impressed by the craftsmanship she encountered on a trip to India, Lichtenberg commissioned artisans to make a series of hollow gold chains with gold lockets fastening them.
Those first pieces sold out on Instagram and now form the backbone of a multi-category collection showcasing traditional jewelry crafts like guilloché, en tremblant, chain-making, and enamel painting. From a hand-carved chain reading “All you need is love,” to her secular scapular necklaces and highly engineered surprise pendants, each piece is infused with meaning, humor and a finely honed sense of design.
Originality isn’t easy to find these days, and Lichtenberg has been the victim of counterfeiting many times over. In 2023, she hit back with the limited-edition Raiz’In by Marie Lichtenberg collection, which offers resin versions of her jewels — a riposte to the copiers and an opportunity for buyers to access the brand at a lower price point. On top of that, she donates a portion of the collection’s proceeds to charity.
Strengthening ties
In the face of uncertainty around US trade tariffs and unstable raw-material pricing, it’s a tricky time for the jewelry industry, but the climate has not impacted Lichtenberg’s brand yet.
“That’s not luck, it’s anticipation,” says the designer. “We’ve built a model based on constant dialogue and trust. Leading up to Couture, we stayed in close sync with our wholesale partners. We do business with our eyes wide open, hands joined, risks shared.”
She plans to continue the tradition of handing down a locket to her daughter. “It’s always the locket. It’s not just a jewel, it’s an heirloom, a secret keeper, a piece of your soul to pass on.”
Around her own neck, she wears her Dado dice and Dragon scapular, and she has gold bangles at her wrists. Perhaps the most telling piece is her No Risk, No Glory necklace, which speaks to her significant motivation and drive. It’s a reminder to be brave, and it’s never felt more pertinent.
Main image: The gold, diamond, ruby and suede bandana the designer unveiled at Couture 2025. (Marie Lichtenberg)
